Why was World War I called The Great War?

The up-to-the-minute accounts of the final hour August chats has never been better presented. Hastings' thesis: once Russia committed to Serbia's defense, there was no way to stop it. A-H wanted revenge (and territory), Germany willing to help.

i still can't quite handle the news that there are no WWI vets left, let alone the fact that WWII vets are dying out.

kinda serendipitous for me that i've been playing my first game of diplomacy these last couple weeks (supposedly JFK + kissinger's favorite game) and i got assigned Austria. germany is really the only country you can count on on the board. italy + turkey too tempted sitting on your border and you're ultimately going to have to deal with russia if you want to take a shot at winning the game. they actually have a name for an austrian german alliance in diplomacy: anschluss

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anschluss

yeah, it's anachronistic, but understandable

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/27/world/legacy-of-world-war-i.html

I'm also reading Richard Striner's Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Burden Too Great to Bear, which makes the same case that Walter Karp did in the seventies but obscured in the wake of John Milton Cooper and A. Scott Bergg's solid recent bios: this messiah wanted to be the savior of the world from the beginning.

had it for years, but perhaps now i will get all the way through the war the infantry knew, which is a welcome antidote to general melchett-type histories

the answer to OP is that the war was really cool

so great

otm

no ww1 thread is complete without some wilson-bashing!

man screw wilson

Edith did, quite a lot.

My 11 year old cousin just referred to America as back to back world war champions. He gets it.

What's so great about war anyway.

https://twitter.com/RealTimeWWI btw

recent article by usually v good Paul Mason, formerly of Newsnight, now of C4 news, whose Gaza reporting has been superb (and obviously <3 his Northern Soul documentary):

How Did the First World War Actually End.

finally

The first big Red Scare in the USA was prompted by the apparent successes of the Bolsheviks in Russia and the growing organization of the labor/socialist movement in the USA. Attributing the final victory over Germany to organized worker resistance was a narrative that had to be censored out of existence.

it's almost as if when the German Right was obsessed with the country having been stabbed in the back there was some historical reason behind it

neither my wife nor i remember learning about how ww1 ended in [american] high school. i didn't have history classes in high school but i did take the reagants and had to study independently for both the american history and world history tests and i don't remember it being a part of the curriculum for either.

tho we did learn about a. american participation in and contributions during the war, and b. the archduke and lead-in to the war

the general way it's taught in the UK if at all is kinda "the German economy wasn't doing so well and they couldn't afford to keep fighting even tho the Eastern front had ended and mumble mumble something oh look a poppy"

that "usually" read the wrong way. I meant usually very good (but not always) + here is an article by him, rather than usually v good but her is an article by him that isn't.

Daphnis's summation of school WW1 history teaching spot on.

i don't remember how it's taught in school in america -- probably just that we swooped in and won it at the end + the french are wusses. certainly much less of a Thing than ww2 or the american civil war

we did the archduke in a kind of vague vacuum (someone shot him... and a war started!) because to go into any more detail would have required betraying that something happened in the 19c besides our civil war. then we watched all quiet on the western front. better than the longest day: fewer class periods.

our history curriculum was quite good on buildup and execution of ww1 iirc

merely a ploy to put off home rule

ya p much

neither my wife nor i remember learning about how ww1 ended in american high school. i didn't have history classes in high school but i did take the reagants and had to study independently for both the american history and world history tests and i don't remember it being a part of the curriculum for either.

Pretty sure we just learned about WWI as prelude to WWII--("Germany had all these reparations to pay. Why? Because there was this other war that wasn't as interesting.")

A good recent book about U.S. involvement confirms the thesis advanced by Walter Karp thirty years ago which refutes what we learned in high school about a noble, reluctant Woodrow Wilson. The consequences of the peace put in stark relief too.

i don't remember how it's taught in school in america -- probably just that we swooped in and won it at the end + the french are wusses.

uh this is definitely not how it was taught at my school

At my high school (early 80s, private American), WWI was framed in roughly equal parts of "Europe shaking off monarchy and transitioning to nation-states" and "hey, hey world, we're the Americans." I knew what the Zimmerman Telegram and the Palmer Raids were going into the final and aced it.

In college (at good ole UC Irvine of all places!) I lucked into a Topics in 20th Century History class that ended up being entirely about WWI. Three weeks alone on August 1914. What I remember most was reading an editorial printed in one of the London papers around 1916. No explanation for the cause of the Great War made sense other than "people just got tired of being peaceful."

40 maps that explain World War I
http://www.vox.com/a/world-war-i-maps

this may not be the right thread for this question, but I am trying to track down an anecdote involving I think Bismarck and William I in hopes that I did not imagine it. I think they were on a train or carriage riding past a square and William said something like he feared that some action they had recently taken would result in them both being executed in that square and Bismarck replying along the lines of "yes but what a thrilling way to die that would be." The details are really fuzzy at this point so I suppose it could have been some other monarch/advisor combo but I think it was William I/Bismarck. Anyway, hoping this rings a bell for someone...

ended up finding it myself after all, for the record, it was a conversation after the blood and iron speech:

Bismarck thought that the words he had spoken
on the 30th of September, 1862, might have been
used against him with Wilhelm, and he was right.
Having gone to meet him when travelling, and
getting with him into an ordinary first-class car-
riage, he found him " visibly depressed." The
King was still under the impression of his talks
with Queen Augusta. Bismarck wanted to explain
his words, but Wilhelm interrupted him :

" I foresee exactly how it will all end. Down there,
in the Opern Platz, beneath my windows, they'll
cut off your head, and then, a little later, mine."

Bismarck simply answered, " And after that,
sire ? " " Well, after that we shall be dead."

"Yes," vehemently retorted Bismarck, "after
that we shall be dead ; but one must needs die
sooner or later, and could we perish in a worthier
way ?

I like how you can tell Julius Caesar is mortally wounded because he starts speaking Latin.

they are currently repeating the 10 part The First World War series from 2003 on BBC4. It is very good, in fact brilliant.

sounds great, must look for a rip

World War I was a great war... for me to poop on

xp
I got one, that took ages to dl and is 7.3gb. But it was worth the loss of memory space.

this series isn't as myopic as others and goes into the World aspect of it tbf

^^^this series is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. It's good!

I'm almost done w/The Guns of August, likely plunging into The Sleepwalkers and Catastrophe 1914 soon.

any recommendations on books covering the whole of the war or other periods of the war?

The Deluge by Tooze is a brilliant book on the "20 year armistice"* between the wars. Sleepwalkers is a really great as well.

* 1919 quote from some French general at Versailles, 20 years to the day of Hitler invading Poland.

The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order is the full title.

thanks that looks right up my alley!

I was thinking recently about the cultural invisibility of WWI in the states, which makes sense in a lot of ways. The U.S. was far less involved, and consequently it has been overshadowed by WWII. It is a very complicated war with no outsized heroes or villains (not saying there were no heroes or villains, clearly Albert of Belgium is a significant example in the former camp) so it's harder to pin down, you've got to dig into pre-war geopolitics a bit and I still have to get into it more. (Probably should get that AJP Taylor book folks have raved about.)

Which leads to the limited understanding I had growing up, via textbooks, which is that "Archduke Ferdinand got shot and everyone got very angry and fought."

But it's maybe an even better example of the insanity of war in terms of how wars come about than WWII.

there are loads of good bbc programmes on the buildup and complex causes but damned if i remember any of em

Capitalism, amirite?

men